The Heart Is a Shifting Sea Page 28

  And they all recalled how Maya and Veer’s stars had not matched. “Remember, all the unbelievable things happened on the night of their wedding?” said Anika. The rain. The lateness of the hour. The eight times around the sacred fire instead of seven.

  “A few years back I even changed my married name,” said Maya.

  “We are very worried about you,” said Anika. “We would not have put our hands there and helped with the wedding if we had not believed and been committed to helping you in your marriage.”

  “What is Kancha doing?” said Raj. “I don’t even know.”

  Maya nodded, but her enthusiasm for the conversation was waning. Where were they years ago, when the marriage first began to go bad?

  “Maya,” said Raj, perking up. “At least go see his parents once in a while, go with Kancha.”

  “No, I won’t,” said Maya, putting down her cup with finality. “Any woman would react this way under the circumstances and wouldn’t see them.”

  “What about divorce?”

  No. They all agreed it wasn’t an option, because Veer’s parents could try to take Janu away.

  “There’s no solution, then,” said Anika.

  “I will talk to Kancha again,” said Raj.

  “It’s my mistake,” said Maya, who began to clear the teacups. “Because I knew who Kancha was and married him anyway.”

  Anika and Raj looked at her helplessly. That night, in the middle of the night, Janu fell sick, and in the morning he vomited up his chocolate milk.

  * * *

  The next evening, Maya and Anika took Janu to Aksa Beach just before sundown. As Janu built castles from the hard-packed sand and men hawked fresh lime soda behind them, Anika asked Maya if she was seeing another man.

  “No,” said Maya, her voice tight. She was losing patience with this intervention now. It felt as if Raj and Anika were now considering her as perpetrator and Veer as victim. If Veer was sick, then perhaps she was the one to blame. They think that Kancha is in this state because of me, that I have to set him right, she thought. How am I going to do that? He’s not a child. And I’m not a god. I’m human.

  Back at home, Veer arrived late from work to find Maya, Raj, and Anika sitting at the dinner table talking. Janu was already in bed. As Veer walked into the room, he began singing an old Bollywood ballad, the kind he used to sing to his grandfather. He danced past them into the kitchen and brought out four glasses, along with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Double Black.

  “You can’t drink that,” said Maya.

  “Doctor said I could have ninety milliliters,” said Veer.

  “Sir,” Raj said, “you are lying.”

  Veer changed the subject. He began singing boisterously, though there also seemed to be an edge to it. He looked tired and frail. When he stopped singing, Maya was afraid of what he might say. He drained his glass and began talking of his trips to Africa.

  “It’s the best thing in the world,” he told Raj and Anika. “The best.” He paused and turned to look at Maya. “People who travel in cattle class like her would never understand.”

  The room was quiet. Maya looked at her lap. Raj opened up a star sign application on his phone.

  “Read our stars,” said Maya.

  Raj entered in Maya’s and Veer’s details—when and where they were born—and a wheel on the app turned around and around, calculating. The app delivered its finding: for this couple, there was no compatibility and no love. Maya and Veer both laughed, perhaps bitterly. Raj continued to read aloud. “It seems you should have a separate house and a separate car,” he said. Maya doubted this was the real reading. He is just trying to save our marriage, she thought.

  Raj closed the app, and the room fell quiet again, save for the ticking of the Hindi-script clock. “Ask Maya why she married me,” Veer said. He seemed drunk from the whiskey now.

  “Because I was in love with you,” said Maya.

  “Was?” asked Anika.

  “You asked about the past, so I am answering in the past tense.”

  “And why did you marry Maya?”

  “This is a bullshit question, actually,” Veer said, standing up unsteadily. “Time for another drink.”

  That night, Maya went to bed upset. The next morning, she cried as Veer got ready for work. “Why don’t you just leave me?” she said. “Everyone thinks I’m responsible for your health problems or tries to blame me, so why don’t you just leave?”

  “Do you have a problem with me?” Veer asked.

  “No,” she said, in tears.

  “And I don’t have a problem with you. You live your life and I’ll live mine.”

  After Veer went to work, Raj and Anika sat Maya down again. But Maya was in no mood to be lectured. “Stop blaming me,” she shouted at them, and slammed the door as she left for work.

  When she came home for lunch, she found that Raj and Anika had gone, leaving behind a note of apology. As Maya read it, she thought: I’m tired of this life, of this crap, of enduring this.

  Have a nice flight, she texted them.

  Nine years of damage cannot be undone by one day of talking.

  * * *

  That week, Veer told himself: If Maya leaves me, it’s okay. It would be okay. Because I have seen that my mother has left me and it is okay. Two people have left me and it’s okay. If this Maya also left him, he would be all right. His businesses would keep going, and he would keep bringing in money. He told himself that as a Marwari that was all that mattered.

  Maya changed her profile photo on WhatsApp to an image of a semicolon, with text that read: “Choose to keep going.” Then she changed it to a Charles Bukowski quote about a woman that was “mad” but “magic,” there was “no lie in her fire.”

  She changed her Facebook photo to a seductive photo of herself, wearing party jhumka earrings and a silk sari, staring at the camera, with kajal lining her eyes.

  She talked to some of her male friends over text and planned to meet one of them at a motel for lunch but didn’t follow through. The next day it came out in the papers that Mumbai cops had raided the motel and harassed the couples they found inside. They charged some of them under the country’s old morality laws, holding them for “obscenity in public,” though all of them had been indoors.

  The Mumbai High Court said it was shocked by the raids and that the police needed to understand that the city was changing. But Maya knew it hadn’t changed that much.

  * * *

  Later that month Navratri approached, the festival for the Hindu goddess Durga, the mother goddess, the power of all gods combined. Durga was creator, preserver, and destroyer. Durga was evidence that the supreme being was a woman. And Durga was related to the concept of Maya—the belief that the world was an illusion—because it was said that Durga was Lord Krishna’s illusory energy. Durga helped Krishna confuse the living beings who fell into attachment and believed that temporary attractions brought them happiness. The ones who did not understand that life, like marriage, was both magic and illusion. Durga was one of Maya’s favorite gods. To celebrate her, she decided to host a Navratri celebration for her preschool and invite all the students, teachers, and parents.

  On the day of the party, Veer surprised Maya by coming home from work on time. As he got dressed in a fancy red kurta, Maya put on a flowing tie-dyed dress she had handmade from Ashni’s shop, which was prospering ever since she had taken over for her husband. Maya dressed Janu in a pink kurta that matched her own and combed his hair to one side, like his father’s. The three of them drove to the hall together and Veer helped Maya set up.

  The event began with an aarti, during which Maya and the teachers passed around a lamp with a candle, clapping as they sang a chant to Durga: “Creative, creative, mother of the world . . .”

  Afterward, parents, teachers, and children began dancing the dandiya raas, a devotional dance inspired by Krishna, and also the garba, in celebration of the female form. They twirled and clapped in a giant moving circle. The m
en wore colorful kurtas, and the women had on heavy gold jewelry and makeup and chaniya cholis, dresses that spun out like upside-down teacups. The toddlers wore kajal on their eyes, and bangles and colorful caps, and held tiny dandiya sticks. Everyone sweated in the October heat.

  Maya, who preferred to watch, sat on the sidelines holding one of the youngest students. When Ashni arrived, she hugged Maya hello. “Take my photo, nah?” Ashni said. She wore tight leggings and a deep blue and turquoise top from her shop. She looked at the photo Maya took and shook her head. “Take another?” The photos were for her lover. Her husband had not come to the party.

  Maya stood up and tapped the microphone. It was time to give out prizes. Ashni gave out awards for best dancers and best dressed, and then Maya took the mic again. “And now, the last ten minutes of the party will be reserved for freestyle dancing,” she said.

  Veer, who had been missing during the dandiya raas and garba, now appeared on the dance floor to move to music he knew. As he danced in his long red kurta, he didn’t seem sick at all. He seemed like his old self: the carefree, affectionate boy his childhood friends had all known. The man Maya first met at a wedding, who had joked and made the entire wedding party laugh. Maya gestured toward Veer and said into the microphone: “For freestyle we will have my husband. This is my husband, Veer. I know you’ve rarely seen much of him.”

  Veer didn’t react to the jab and kept dancing. He was here now. Maya turned to the DJ. “Turn up the music,” she said. The song was “DJ Wale Babu,” an addictive new pop song that sounded nothing like the old songs Veer loved. Still, he danced. “Duniya rakhun jooton ke niche . . .” “I keep the world under my shoes . . .” “Baki puri kar dunga me koi kasar jo reh rahi hai,” “The rest is left to chance.” Veer began clapping his hands, and Janu danced beside him, giggling. Maya put down the microphone and began to dance along with them. As the song ended, Veer threw his arms toward Maya, the gesture of a Bollywood hero toward his heroine. Maya moved toward him, in time.

  Moving House

  Shahzad and Sabeena, 2014 to 2015

  “The heart is like a bird: love as its head, and its two wings are hope and fear.”

  —Scholar Ibn al-Qayyim

  It was May, and Mumbai’s savannah climate did not disappoint. The air in the city was hot and sticky as Narendra Modi, from the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, assumed power as prime minister, and as Shahzad went to see the doctor again. As chief minister of Gujarat, Modi had failed to prevent, and possibly encouraged, days of communal violence and rioting in the state, which had left close to eight hundred Muslims dead. Since then, his whispered nickname had been “the Butcher of Gujarat.” But Modi had also turned around the state’s economy, the kind of turnaround many thought India needed. Especially after the country had not leapfrogged China the way economists had predicted it would. And so Modi was elected in a landslide, with the help of the RSS, the group whose march to the Babri Masjid had led to the mosque’s demolition, which led to the riots in Mumbai. India’s Muslims, who, though they were growing in number, represented only 13 percent of the population, saw once again that they had little say. Shahzad arrived at the doctor’s office feeling fearful and angry.

  “Doctor, you are doing nothing for me,” Shahzad said. He was tired of showing up and leaving empty-handed. “What can I do for you?” said the doctor. “Nobody in the world can do what you want.” But Shahzad reminded him he did not want pills to have children anymore. “At least I can have proper sex with my wife. At least that.” “All right,” the doctor said, and gave him pills for performance, to be taken twice a day. Shahzad decided to double the dose.

  The tablets made Shahzad sweaty and fuzzy-headed and upset his stomach—though perhaps some of that had to do with the election. His performance barely improved, but he permitted himself to believe that the heavy sensation in his testicles meant he was getting better.

  “Something is happening,” Shahzad told the doctor, breathlessly, on a second visit. The doctor indulged his delusion and prescribed him another round.

  After Modi’s election, Shahzad and Sabeena’s friends and family and neighbors began to worry that steps would be taken against them on a grander scale. In the run-up to the election, Modi had made anti-Muslim statements, which leaders of the Indian National Congress, the party previously in power, would not do. The Congress party had its own problems, of course; since its glory days of helping lead the independence fight against the British, the party had become riddled with nepotism and corruption. It had also failed to root out poverty or deliver enough economic growth or reforms. And it had looted the country of thousands of crores, which was its own kind of murder. So it was no surprise that Congress had been voted out, even in favor of the Butcher of Gujarat.

  Shahzad and Sabeena felt fearful in a way they hadn’t in years. Even if Modi didn’t institute anti-Muslim initiatives, they knew his legions of bhakts, or devotees, would do his work for him.

  Achhe din aane waale hain. “The good days are coming.” This was Modi’s campaign slogan. But Shahzad and his friends did not believe it applied to them.

  In June, the month after Modi’s win, Ramadan approached, along with Shahzad and Sabeena’s two favorite holidays. Sabeena loved the Night of Forgiveness best, the evening on which Allah decided the fortunes of all people: who would live, who would die, and what would or wouldn’t happen during the year. On this night, Muslims prayed for good days ahead and for all their sins to be forgiven. Those who prayed hard and lamented their failings would be forgiven.

  Shahzad preferred the Night of Power, which marked the day that the Prophet Muhammad went to meet Allah, the Quran was revealed, and the angels descended, bringing heaven to Earth. From this meeting the Prophet also brought namaaz to men. It was said that the Night of Power was better than one thousand nights combined, and that any man who prayed on this evening received the power of praying on all one thousand. Shahzad often prayed until morning, despite his exhaustion from Ramadan fasting. It made him feel close to God. This year, he decided he would ask Allah for good luck in Dharavi and to help him perform for Sabeena.

  But when Ramadan started, Shahzad had to stop taking his pills. If I continue to take them and also fast, I will become mad, he thought. He promised himself he’d resume when the holiday was over.

  Sabeena, meanwhile, devoted herself to her holiday cooking, preparing gulab jamun, firni, pudding, custard, halwa, and other sweet dishes for the family, which she loved to do. She put on her special salwar kameez and best gold. While Nadine complained that Farhan did not give her anything, Shahzad had begun to surprise Sabeena with expensive gifts. When she wore the jewelry, the gold shimmering on her neck, ears, and wrists, it made her feel as if everything in their marriage was all right.

  * * *

  Ever since Modi had assumed office, many Muslims held tighter to their faith. Shahzad prayed harder to Allah than before and placed more faith in the Quran, which he had started questioning after he learned it prevented adoption. But Sabeena had never doubted that Islam was the superior religion. For her, the first evidence of this came in the Neil Armstrong story, which she had heard when she was young. The story went that when Armstrong landed on the moon, he heard a sound like music. It was a haunting, beautiful, and somehow familiar sound, so he taped it to listen to later. When Armstrong went to Cairo, he heard the exact same sound. It was the azaan—the Muslim call to prayer. That very day, Armstrong converted to Islam.

  It did not matter that there was no evidence for the Neil Armstrong story or that sound could not be heard on the moon. In her bones Sabeena felt the story was true. The moon was a powerful force in Islam; without it there would be no calendar or way to measure time. Islamic months always began with the sighting of the moon. When Ramadan began, Sabeena sometimes went up to their rooftop to view the moon’s sliver, a gleaming crescent in the polluted night sky.

  For Shahzad, better proof of Islam’s superiority came from the scholars of religiou
s texts who read the Bible, Vedas, and Quran and decided the Quran was the most lucid among them. These scholars included firangis like the British novelist Marmaduke Pickthall, who converted to Islam from Christianity and later translated the Quran into English. They also came from the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany.

  In recent years, though, there had been some troubling events. There was news of increasing incidents of Islamic terrorism. Shahzad had been startled by the 9/11 attacks in the United States, and then the nightmare continued with Muslim extremist groups like the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and ISIS, and the terrorist attacks on India, supposedly from Pakistan. These attacks only bolstered leaders like Modi. But these terrorists weren’t real Muslims. Sabeena saw them as cowards who killed innocents, which Islam never instructed anyone to do. Shahzad thought they’d misinterpreted the Quran’s meaning of jihad as being a physical struggle for believers. To him, jihad meant the simple duty a man had to spread the religion.

  Shahzad despised the terrorists for what they were doing to Islam, transforming it from a religion of beauty to one of violence. In the Quran, heaven was described as more gorgeous than the human mind could fathom: with flowing milk, gardens, and angels everywhere. Everyone was young and happy. If you drank the water, you could see it flow through your body, because in heaven your skin was translucent. Shahzad thought that when it came time to die, it was better to die a Muslim.

  But Shahzad did not want to feel old. He wanted to feel young—and he still wanted to be a father. At the very least, he wanted to be able to perform so he could feel some measure of strength and dignity. As a Muslim in Modi’s India, having power seemed more important than ever. And in many ways, the land in Dharavi felt like his last hope.